JCVD

Remember that part at the end of Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey where Wyld Stallyns are about to perform for a sold-out crowd and they suddenly realize that they still don't know how to play their instruments? So what they do is, they hop into their time machine, and when they pop back up onstage a second later, they've both got ZZ Top beards and they're like, "Whoa, that was a most excellent 18 months of intensive guitar training with Eddie Van Halen." I think the same thing happened to Jean-Claude Van Damme right before shooting started on JCVD, only with acting. I think he suddenly realized that he didn't have the chops to pull off a movie that involved more emoting than kicking, so he broke his old Timecop temporal displacement device out of mothballs and went back to the fifties to take some Method classes with Brando.

Actually, I don't think even that would be enough to explain the thespianic transformation Jean-Claude underwent for this film. I think he must have pulled an Excellent Adventure and traveled throughout the seventies, assembling all of its best actors. He kidnapped De Niro from the set of Taxi Driver, snatched Pacino from Godfather II, gave Hackman the Vulcan neck pinch on The Conversation, and had just enough room left over to stuff Dustin Hoffman into the time machine in his Ratso Rizzo costume. Then they had all kinds of crazy fish-out-of-water adventures in the present day (You should have seen the look on De Niro's face when he accidentally caught Meet the Fockers on cable) while Van Damme finally, after more than 20 years in Hollywood, learned that there's more to the art of screen acting than making your eyes get all buggy and cross-eyed while yelling "Nuuuh!" in your weird, flat Belgian accent. He learned that you can't just imitate the bells and whistles of human emotions; you have to feel them deep inside, because if you don't, the audience never will. And I'm also thinking that he taught all these great actors a thing or two in return and, in doing so, accidentally changed film history for the better. Just think, without Jean-Claude's influence, Pacino's legendary kickboxing sequence in Dog Day Afternoon would never have existed.

Granted, there are probably a few non-time-travel-related factors that may have contributed to the effectiveness of Van Damme's performance in JCVD. For one, he's playing himself. It's the role he was born to play. For two, most of the dialogue is in French, his native tongue. But that doesn't fully explain it, either. I've seen plenty of jackasses try to play themselves and fail miserably, and Jean-Claude's even pretty damn good in his few English-speaking scenes in JCVD. Yeah, the more I think about it, the more the time machine thing is the only explanation that makes any sense. The only other thing I can think of is that he's secretly been this good all along, and that, my friends, is too mind-blowing to contemplate.

Okay, here's the deal: JCVD is the new Jean-Claude Van Damme movie starring Jean-Claude Van Damme as Jean-Claude Van Damme. The first scene is amazing. All the other reviews are gonna tell you about it, so I will, too. It's one long tracking shot, Touch of Evil-style, in which the camera follows Jean-Claude around a warehouse full of bad guys. In a single unbroken take, he engages in hand-to-hand combat, shoots a bunch of people, throws a grenade, and evades a flamethrower. It's well-choreographed and shot, with an awesome funky but melancholy soul song playing, but the funny part is that it's not very well executed. Punches miss by about a foot, and the timing is always a little bit off. It's all very subtle, until the scenery starts falling down, and you realize that you're on the set of Van Damme's latest straight-to-video opus, directed by some punk HK music video director with asymmetrical hair who doesn't have Jean-Claude's commitment to excellence. From the first scene, the Muscles From Brussels is characterized as a man who feels that he is capable of much more than world is offering him. He needs a mission, a calling, a raison d'être, and for his sins, JCVD gives him one.

After this straightforward opener, the structure of the movie gets all Tarantino-y, as the story is broken up into out-of-order chapters with pretentious titles like "The Answer Before The Question." It's kind of cool because you have to work a little harder than usual to piece together the story, but I'm not sure if the story itself requires it. It's pretty simple: Jean-Claude is in the middle of an expensive child custody case, but when he goes into a Belgian bank to transfer funds to his lawyer, he gets caught up in a hostage crisis of which the cops think he's the mastermind. Then he has to find out if he really does have a hero inside of him or if he's just a full-of-shit actor whose best years are behind him (and they really weren't all that great anyway).

I wish I could tell you more about the movie, but I kind of had a hard time following it. It's not really the movie's fault, though. It's just that I saw it at the Angelika, where Jean-Claude himself was supposed to appear for a Q&A, only he cancelled because, I shit you not, his puppy was in a coma in Thailand. How fucking sensitive is that? Can't you just imagine Jean-Claude sitting by the puppy's bedside, holding his paw and whispering, "Dun dew eet, ma fren. Dun go indo da lide." (Side note: "Thailand Puppy Coma" should be a Melvins song.)

Anyway, the Angelika is one of them there arthouses, which I'm all for, except that the Angelika sucks. The theaters are so long and skinny that it feels like you're watching a screen the size of a postcard through a paper towel tube. And the print of JCVD I saw had white subtitles, which wouldn't be a problem if it weren't for the fact that the cinematography is all blown-out and sun-blasted. It looks really cool, except that there are glints and sheens and splashes of white everywhere, making a lot of the dialogue illegible. You're trying to follow along, but you can only read half the words, so it's like "No, Jean…do it…gun here…police will…understand?"

This won't be a problem on DVD, though, so home viewers willl be able to fully enjoy the script, which is witty and self-referential without ever losing sight of the drama, particularly in this one scene where Jean-Claude suddenly levitates up above the set of the movie and, hanging amidst the lights in the rafters, proceeds to give an unedited five-minute monologue directly to camera. I didn't catch a big chunk of it, but he talks about his childhood and his marriages and his drug problem and his dreams. He promises to be the hero he always wanted to be, the one he pretended to be for so long that he forgot who he really was. He even starts breaking down and crying a little. I was on the edge of my seat the whole time. Not a single person in a theater full of hipster douchebags let out so much as a giggle while this man, this washed-up has-been who was a joke even in his prime, laid it all out on the line. I couldn't even understand half of what he was saying, but the emotion, man. The emotion came through loud and clear. Jean-Claude was never my favorite action hero, but he won me over with this speech. I don't think any other tough guy could have bared his soul so nakedly. Seagal might have tried, but I don't think he would have let his guard down like this. There really was no bullshit in Jean-Claude's speech at all. This was the beating, yearning heart of Van Damme, the one muscle he never got to exercise in any of his other films. I never thought I'd say this, but I wanted to give that sweaty, bulging bastard a big fucking hug right then and there.

Then I remembered that YouTube clip where he got a boner live on a Brazilian dance show and I thought better of it.

Anyway, you should all definitely see JCVD. If enough of us check it out, there is every reason to believe that Van Damme's action contemporaries will follow suit and step their game up. He's proved with this film that everyone, no matter how seemingly talentless and ridiculously accented, has hidden depths. Personally, I'm holding out for a remake of Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries starring Chuck Norris as an elderly martial artist reliving the many, many asses he's kicked over the course of his life and the effect they've had on him. Or maybe even Seagal Satyricon. The point is, if Jean-Claude can do it, so can they. C'mon, guys. Let's see a little hustle out there.

P.S. How bullshit is it that the marketing department didn't use "Stock up on penicillin, because on November 7, America will catch JCVD" as the tagline on the poster? I really do have to think of everything, don't I?

The Shepherd: Border Patrol

Watching JCVD made me want to do some research into the recent work of Jean-Claude Van Damme to see if his newfound acting chops had any historical precedent. So I checked out The Shepherd: Border Patrol, which I'd heard was the best of his straight-to-video output. And I gotta say, it was an entertaining meat-and-potatoes flick with some well-staged action and a few inspired touches. It won't change your life, but it's got a good chance of positively influencing your Sunday afternoon.

Let's talk about the title first. The second half of it makes sense, but the first half is like some random Polaroid that Pearl Jam stuck in the middle of their liner notes that has nothing to do with anything and you're like "What is that, a seashell? Somebody's pierced nostril? A phrenology chart in extreme closeup?" It's a complete non-sequitur, almost Dadaist in its aggressive incongruity. Some have postulated that the titular shepherd is actually the villain of the piece, an ex-Special Ops commander who has taken to smuggling heroin across the U.S.-Mexico border by strapping it to illegal immigrants. I call bullshit on that. Not only does no one say anything about anyone shepherding anything in the entire movie, I consider the connotations of the word "shepherd" to be far too positive to be connected to a guy who likes to blow his runners up with explosive vests when they get caught. What I think actually happened was, the sheisty charlatans who financed this flick sold it to distributors under the proposed title The Shepherd, little realizing that that aspect of the story was already being written out of the script by the army of straight-to-video screenwriting monkeys they had locked up in a warehouse in Burbank. But since the wheels of commerce were already in motion, they were stuck with it, so they slapped that Border Patrol part on there to make it look like they'd actually seen the movie they'd made. Basically, it would be like if The Goonies was called Tentacle Cove because of that scene with the octopus that got cut out.

Wait a minute, I just figured this whole thing out. So Jean-Claude is on the New Mexico border patrol, right? He's just transferred there from New Orleans, which is not the first time he's pretended to be Cajun to explain his accent. He's all tortured and shit, but you don't know why. It has something to do with a vague flashback he has where some chick falls back on a bed and closes her eyes and Van Damme knocks over a bookcase. Heavy duty shit. His name is Jack, and he has a bunny who's also named Jack that he carries around in a cage all the time. I think this might be symbolism, I don't know. Hard to tell.

So Van Damme's first assignment is to fight these evil drug-running, immigrant-smuggling mercs, who are known as "coyotes." So think about it: What's the job of a shepherd? To protect his flock from coyotes and other predators. So I guess Jean-Claude really is The Shepherd, even though he does no shepherding whatsoever and no one ever refers to him as such, and in any case he never manages to save any illegal immigrants and that whole angle is a very small part of the movie anyway. The word "shepherd" also has some religious associations than I don't think the movie warrants (unlike in Cyborg, Van Damme does not get crucified for our sins this time), but I'm still glad I could finally get to the bottom of this completely pointless mystery.

Anyway, this movie has a lot of things going for it. It's got a body count in the mid double digits, and the fights are inventive and well-shot, with lots of modified jujitsu moves where dudes climb up their opponents like spider monkeys and flip them over. Despite being in his late forties, Van Damme does a lot of his own stunts, too, as evidenced by this one shot where you can see his face the whole time he does a full body flip around some guy's neck. And the explosive vests are a nice touch, because watching people blow up is one of the things that ignited my love of cinema in the first place.

There's one incredible part in the middle where the coyotes are disguised as priests on a heroin-filled bus full of real nuns and priests. When they get stopped by the cops, all these secret compartments open up and mounted machine guns pop out. Then there's a big firefight where Jean-Claude gets to shoot indiscriminately in the direction of innocent bystanders while the bus knocks police cars through the air. Then they escape to Mexico, but Jean-Claude doesn't give a dog's dick about that jurisdiction crap, so he follows and shoots it out with the villains some more, leaving many nuns and priests dead.

Then Jean-Claude manages to sneak onto the bus for some slick close-quarters combat, complete with human shield, but then his partner, Officer Turncoat McDeadguy, sells him out to the drug lords, who live in a big mansion with heavily squibbed statues all over the place and a swimming pool full of big-tittied bikini bitches. There's an early scene where one of the bad guys keeps lighting small sticks of dynamite on his cigar and throwing them into pool where the chicks are swimming. Nobody seems to mind this overmuch. It's a good thing that guy gets gassed to death in a barn a few scenes later because eventually that joke was going to stop being funny when somebody's breast implant got popped by flying shrapnel.

So Jean-Claude gets thrown in a Mexican prison, where the chief of police gives us a Van Damme staple by making him fight a cage match against the Mexican penal system's number one mixed martial arts champion. The police chief also employs one of my very favorite lazy writing clichés: He speaks perfect English for most of the sentence, until he gets to the words that the screenwriter learned in high school Spanish. Take this line, for instance. "I'll never understand you Americans. Why can't you keep your problems in su país?" So let me get this straight. This guy has a firm grasp on contractions and rhetorical questions, but he can't handle the word "country," which they probably teach on the very first day of Inglés 101? Nice try, warehouse full of typing monkeys.

Luckily, people don't talk very often in this movie, particularly Van Damme. I think he has like six lines of dialogue in the first 15 minutes, and three of them are "Yes, ma'am" and two of them are "I would like a cheeseburger and a coke, please." Luckily, he gets into a barfight in less than 12 minutes, so I ain't complaining. The dude's still got moves, but I don't really like him as the brooding, tortured hero type. I want to see him smiling and hitting on the ladies, like in real life. I think maybe this is why his acting was so much better in JCVD, because they let him talk. Left to his own devices, the man is a total babbler who's beloved by the French for routinely dropping the most ridiculous bon mots of all time. (Example: "Air is beautiful, yet you cannot see it. It's soft, yet you cannot touch it. Air is a little like my brain.") JCVD played more to his strengths than a movie where all he does is glower for whole reels at a time, so then when he finally does talk you haven't had a chance to get used to his accent so everything he says sounds stupid. It's sort of like how sometimes you like a song because it's so bad that it makes you laugh, but then it grows on you and all the irony leaks out so that you don't even remember why you thought it was funny anymore. That's what the sound of Jean-Claude Van Damme talking is like.

Also, has anyone else noticed that he has a huge lump on the right side of his forehead? It looks like a softball is trying to birth itself through his skull.

Anyway, if you like back-to-basics action where the clergy is collateral damage and a floppy-eared bunny rabbit gives the best performance, you could do a lot worse than The Shepherd. It's still got that direct-to-DVD look, but at least it's well framed and edited, which is more than you can say for most theatrical action movies these days. And thanks to over-the-top touches like the awesome bus chase and the exploding vests, it's got a more big-budget feel than anything I've seen from Seagal in at least ten years. Maybe this Van Damme guy's got legs after all.